Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Sónia Sousa et al.
of media itself. Online learning communities one of the examples of such phenomena usually built
upon multidisciplinary and innovative collaborative communities. Our social relations with online
media in general or any technological medium ever since enabled the connection of people with
corresponding interests, regardless of time or space restrictions and always allowed alternative forms
of communication for people who already know each other primarily in real life, also served as support
to a variety of social and professional goals, set a ground for flourishing social networking and
collaboration.
In that perspective communities, societies and culture as a whole are tailored by the diversity of
individuals, and each one contribute to the intellectual climate and technological infrastructure of
society, rather than the effects of media itself. Notions that are connected with the community
development process as the duality between the human need for participation, based on their daily
social experiences and on the reunification of those experiences, i.e describe the learning performed
in terms of participation and reification (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wegner and Snyder, 2000). From
that point of view and according to Lave and Wenger (1991) there is no such thing as "learning" suis
generis, but only changing participation in culturally design settings of everyday life. And this
participation process occurs as a process of changing understanding in practice that is learning. In
other words learning emerges from the duality between the human need for participation, their daily
social experiences and on the reunification of those experiences, i.e the learning is performed in
terms of participation and reification processes as Wegner and Snyder (2000) describes it.
An online community then, can be seen as a facilitator of the knowledge construction process. As
online communities and their environments can provide the needed resources for their members to
learn, can facilitate the learning process, as in this virtual spaces learning occurs as part of each
individual network and their shared relations and interactions (i.e. results within a specific social
context and results from their interactions with their media artifacts) (Pudelko, 2003). Following that
idea, the idea that a virtual learning community-environment can assume an important part of toady’s
virtual learning process, as a learning communities per si as their participants learning while act in
community. In other words a virtual community beside provide members a space for participation also
provide the necessary tools and support for knowledge construction environment, and that is what
shapes individual development and learning (Paavola et.al., 2004; Bandura, 1969; Lave and Wenger,
1991; Brown and Duguid 2000). The main rational of this paper is built on the belief that by
understanding online learning communities we will be able to better foster their inherent formal and
informal learning processes in a number of contexts. This paper describes and discusses the
development and implementation of a research framework designed towards a deeper understanding
of what are online learning communities and how they are seen nowadays within the education
contexts.
3. Research approach
The framework designed here is based on a design-based research approach which is focus on
characterizing on the understanding of community development and influence in all its complexity,
when in online-learning situations, focusing especially in ways to potentiate people’s learning activities
that demands co-working actions and collective learning and sharing activities. This research
approach is focused on a participatory approach design. The major contributions of the research
herein depicted are twofold: On one hand, we identify the main components of community-learning
environments, built on top of an extensive literature review. On the other hand, we outline a
collaborative research strategy to explore people’s perspective of community-learning environments.
This approach included two distinct participatory design sessions: one session deployed with
eLearning expertise and another session deployed with eLearning practitioners. Both participants
were given a focus question: what are online learning communities – and to both were asked to
design a concept map that answer that question. This concept maps provided preliminary exploratory
insights that leaded to the development of overall concept map that defines an online learning
community.
4. Results discussion
Results gathered indicate similarities between experts and non-experts views of online learning
communities, especially when representing the teacher, learner and technology role within the
community space. But, there were as well divergent views in some on how these roles interconnected
with each other and how they are represented within the concept map structure. Also, we argue that
most virtual communities can be considering as learning communities. From that point of vie makes
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